5 Mind-Blowing Ways Science Has Hacked the Human Body

Science fiction taught us that when science starts modifying the human body, it's going to involve robot parts and genetic modification gone terrifyingly wrong. But the reality is that the body modifications that are right around the corner are way less frightening and quite a bit more useful. It won't be too many more years before a trip to the doctor can ...

#5. Change Your Eye Color

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We'll wager that there are more than a few brown-eyed people out there who feel like they got the short end of the genetic stick. However, eye color is one of those things that you probably thought science could never change. Sure, you can wear colored contacts and pretend you've got blue, gray, or freaking ThunderCats-themed eyes, but the illusion only lasts until you remove the lenses. Well, now there's a doctor in California who claims to have invented a procedure that can permanently turn those dull-as-dirt brown eyes into mesmerizing baby blues, and all it'll take is 40 seconds of your life (plus several thousand dollars).

How is this even possible, you ask? Does it involve some kind of horrifying eyeball tattoo gun? Actually, it turns out that, technically, everyone has blue eyes. It's just that for the majority of us, our mundane genes decided to squirt a whole mess of brown pigment on top of the blue. But now Dr. Gregg Homer has arrived, laser-guided pigment bomb in hand, to tell your genes to get bent.

Basically, the procedure consists of laser-burning the shit out of the brown pigment in each of your eyes. Then, since your body never planned for the eventuality of sci-fi death rays attacking its irises and therefore never thought to keep an extra supply of eye pigment on hand, it decides to simply chuck the damaged pigment out. In two or three weeks, all traces of brown disappear, and you're left with eyes worthy of a crooner.

We're sure many of you are scrambling to have your eyeballs lasered by a doctor who sounds like a gag from The Simpsons as soon as humanly possible, but don't get in too much of a rush -- the procedure's still in the testing stages. The good news, though, is that all preliminary tests have turned out well, at least according to Homer. He's tested it on animals, cadavers, and Mexicans (seriously), all without a single complaint. The better news is that if you just can't wait until the procedure gets the official OK from The Man, you can head straight to the not-at-all-evil-sounding Stroma Medical website and volunteer to be a guinea pig for one of the good doctor's trial runs.

A word of warning: As of now, the procedure is permanent, so if for some reason you find your new appearance freakish and want to change it back ... tough shit. Freak.

Comstock Images/Comstock/Getty ImagesWho could ever love a monster such as her?

#4. Regrow Your Teeth

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As long as there are such things as old people, hockey pucks, and Pixy Stix, tooth loss will remain a concern for us humans. After all, when a tooth is broken or falls out, it's not like when you cut your nails or shave your beard -- that shit ain't growing back. Well, actually, that might not be the case for long, as there are not one, but two teams who've set their sights on taking down the denture industry by regrowing your very own teeth right inside your very own mouth-hole.

First, there's a team from the University of Alberta in Canada (where hockey-related tooth loss strikes virtually every male before age 15) who say they've managed to regrow broken teeth by using ultrasound emitters. Seriously, they just point sound waves at your teeth and they grow back. The procedure worked so well on rabbits that the scientists figured, screw it, why not scale up the difficulty and try it out on an animal whose entire diet isn't just cabbage and water? So they tested a variant of their ultrasound method on humans and found that it worked, even when the root itself was damaged. The system consists of a "miniaturized system-on-a-chip" that constantly barrages the root of your tooth with good tooth vibes as you wear it inside your mouth, and in no time ("no time" meaning "about a year") you're right back to popping beer bottle caps with your pearly whites.

Jennifer Becker/Workbook Stock/GettyWhich also happens to be the mating call of Alberta, Canada.

More recently, a bunch of researchers from Columbia University and Nova Southeastern University in Florida have said they can regrow teeth using dental stem cells. When a patient loses a tooth, the docs simply plop some dental stem cells into a tooth-shaped scaffold and wait for the stem cells to work their magic. The patients can grow the new tooth either inside their own mouth or outside the body, but either way, within nine weeks they've got themselves a shiny new food masher. And no, the stem cells being used for this procedure don't come from embryos. Instead, they're collected from discarded teeth or other "dental waste," which we sincerely hope isn't as gross as it sounds (but probably is).

#3. Stay Alive Without Breathing

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Every human has the same huge weakness: If you cut off our air, we die. Disaster is as close as the next piece of triple cheeseburger that goes down the wrong neck hole or Neeson-chop to the throat. It's not like you can take in air any way other than via your lungs -- those frail, spongy bastards pretty much have the market on air intake cornered, you know? Well, a team of researchers at Boston Children's Hospital has found a way to bypass your lazy lungs when they can't be bothered to do their one and only job. They figured that lungs are just the middlemen to get oxygen from the air to the blood, so why not cut them out of the loop and inject oxygen directly into your bloodstream?

Now, injecting air directly into the blood is a little tricky. Normally, some nasty side effects can occur if you just straight up shoot air into your veins, like, um ... an agonizing death. So what these guys did was design tiny microparticles that they could fill with oxygen. Then they surrounded those microparticles with lipids (fats) and put them in a liquid solution to help them blend in with the blood. Finally, to test whether or not their Frankenoxygen worked, the docs injected the solution filled with their tiny lifesavers into animals with low blood oxygen levels.

Photos.com"Jenkins, get in here! It's your turn to strangle Hopper."

When the animals' tracheas were completely blocked, which would normally earn a human a not-so-fashionable throat piercing, the injection of microparticles was able to restore their blood oxygen to completely normal levels in mere seconds. The breathing fix wasn't permanent, as the animals needed to start breathing the old-fashioned way (i.e., not from a hypodermic needle) after 15 minutes. However, for 15 whole minutes, the animals stayed alive without taking a single breath and had a reduced incidence of complications such as heart attacks or other organ injury.

The best part is that, since the solution can be administered via syringe, it's completely portable. This means it can be carried by paramedics and administered within moments of arriving at the scene of the autoerotic asphyxiation gone wrong.

Keith Brofsky/Photodisc/Getty ImagesIt's a bold new day for the sciences of medicine and masturbation.